Chocolate Balls of Jesus

I'm working a block away from the Roger Smith Hotel, where a new exhibit was to open today at their well-known art gallery. You may have heard or read some of the buzz about the Chocolate Jesus and the Church's successful efforts to kill the exhibit. It appears the Catholic hierarchy has more important things to do than investigate its own cadre of child molesters and rapists. Nope: they've got to start a campaign against anyone showing Jesus' dick.

So here's some news for the bloviating Catholics: Jesus had balls, and so did lots of other gods throughout religious history. If I believed that god was a human, I'd want to get to know every inch of Him, wouldn't you? Damn, I'd want to know what God's asshole looked and felt like, too.

But god doesn't have an asshole, nor any genitalia that we'd recognize as such. Pan (above left) did, and so did Bes (right). They, too, were the work of imagination and visual metaphor, just like Jesus. But the cultures that spawned these gods had no FOX News commentators or hypocritical Cardinals to suppress artistic imagery.

By the way, guess what else—I found this page, which is loaded with pics from Christian iconography featuring some pretty well hung guys, including "Saint Priapus."

That this sort of oppressive censorship is happening in the cultural capital of the world, under the guiding hand of Cardinal Egan, is mildly sickening.

But the true believers are getting a little uncomfortable these days, with bestselling authors like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris around. Pastor Rick Warren recently challenged the latter to a debate, which had some amusing highlights. Here's one:

RICK WARREN: I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in nature. I see them in my own life. Trying to understand where God came from is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. Even the most brilliant scientist would agree that we only know a fraction of a percent of the knowledge of the universe.

Yep, Pastor Rick, yer right. Religion is a lot like the Internet. The Bible is the original proto-blog; televangelism is like really loud spam; and the Torah is kind of like Internet Explorer, what with all those rules and the potential for malware attacks at every turn. When I consider the world's religions, I often feel like my spiritual IP address keeps changing; and who can deny an insidious connection between the Old Testament and myspace.com?
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Now here's a story that doesn't mind being dirty. For while MC Rove sanitizes everything he touches, spinning deceit and corruption into pristeen, germ-free truth; and while those Catholics raise their kids to be Easter-Sunday perfect (cleanliness is next to godliness); science is pointing us in another direction: it's good for you to get dirty.

Exposure to dirt may be a way to lift mood as well as boost the immune system, UK scientists say.

Lung cancer patients treated with "friendly" bacteria normally found in the soil have anecdotally reported improvements in their quality of life.

Mice exposed to the same bacteria made more of the brain's "happy" chemical serotonin, the Bristol University authors told the journal Neuroscience.

Common antidepressants work by boosting this brain chemical.

I am reminded of a comment I heard from an old RN with whom I worked many years ago: "Bacteria aren't evil, Brian, they're just doing their jobs."
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Finally today, a tribute to a man who is arguably the world's greatest living writer. I remember getting chills on reading the first few pages of 100 Years of Solitude, and again for Love in the Time of Cholera. Happy 80th, Senor Marquez.

Art as Activism, Part 2

"We are the people who run this county. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to stop this war. Raise hell."—Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins was given a memorial service, and her name is already passing out of the headlines. I assume she'd prefer it that way: fame was never her god, but often the victim of her knife-edged humor. And sentimentality was always repulsive to her. Those of us who love her work will remember her after the mass media and the powerful whom she regularly harried have all forgotten. Here are a few links that are worth attention to any who admired this lady's prescient political insight, humor, and relentless pursuit of truth.

Krugman wrote a very fine piece to Molly's memory, which deserves quotation:

Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the times when it’s most important to do just that. And the fact that she remembered these truths explains something I haven’t seen pointed out in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central political issue of our time.

Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones offers this piece, appropriately titled "Death of a Hellraiser".

And NPR has this page, which includes audio and text files of Ivins at her best.

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Now, to Part 2 of Terry McKenna's piece about activism, art, and Iraq.

So… what story will art hope to tell us about Iraq? By art, I’m including both works now considered “serious” or high art, and popular works; thus movies (even TV like Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show) but also Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.

First, some background: The following three works demonstrate the change in meaning that occurs as time removes the original audience and replaces it with new viewers. The artist who produced the first two works lived in mid 16th century Flanders. He produced a number of politically sensitive drawings and asked his wife to destroy them upon his death.. The artist, Peter Bruegel, is one whose works I admire more than almost all other western painters. Even so, some of what his contemporaries saw is missing for me.


Contrast both with the following photograph. It’s well known, but from a technical standpoint, perhaps no better made than hundreds of equally contemporary images. But in terms of the story it tells – and my ability to grasp the story, it stands out as a remarkable image.



It took almost two decades for the US to begin to write the story of the Viet Nam War. Hopefully we won’t wait as long to deal with our present tragedy.



Let's imagine it as a drama: It could very well begin with a secret conspiracy between the president and his close advisors (including a Darth Vader like Dick Cheney). They might be seen hatching a plan to mislead Congress into giving the president authority to go to war. The public pretense is that by threatening war, the US will force Saddam Hussein to agree to allow weapons inspections. But it turns out the inspections are also just a gambit; the president and his men want to go to war regardless, so when the inspectors are about to reveal the absence of WMD’s – the president tells the inspectors to back off, and he goes to war anyway.

Act one would probably include the aerial bombing campaign and end with the capture of Baghdad.

Most plays are three act affairs, though the Iraq war may surely deserve something on the scale of Wagner – or Homer. Still in a standard play, the middle act (Act 2) could start after the president’s Mission Accomplished speech. In such a play, I’d end Act 2 with the destruction the Al-Askari Mosque.

If you were looking for a traditional heroic ending, you could conclude Act 3 with last Fall’s Democratic victory. On the other hand, if you wanted an existential drama, surely there are facts enough to create a plot line as troubling as Camus’ The Stranger.

—T. McKenna

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Tomorrow, for Geek Wednesday, we'll have more Webby Award nominees featured, along with more on Ubutnu Linux and my latest tangle with IE 7 and a report on its injured master, Uncle Bill. So geek out with us tomorrow here at Daily rEv.

Monday with McKenna: Art as Activism

As we noted in our week-ahead piece Saturday, the President is now calling for his puppet Maliki to show some spine or suffer the consequences. What consequences? The only consequences Maliki is probably worried about would come not from America but from his controller Mr. Al-Sadr, for if you show some spine to that guy, it's likely to be severed.

The fact is, Bush has not only run out of political and geopolitical capital; he's now as deeply in debt on that score as he's put the US Treasury over the past 6 years. So if you're looking for someone to show some spine, it's time to demand it from your new blue Congress. But as the Peace Team is pointing out, Reid and the Dems are already wavering. I recommend you use that link to remind them what you voted for last November.

Now onto Monday with McKenna, for the start of a detailed look at what art can do to further awaken the citizenry of our benighted nation.

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Art as Activism, Part 1: History's Lessons

With the War in Iraq a complete disaster, perhaps it’s time to consider Iraq in a completely different way – as fodder for future artworks. For as the saying goes, if you’ve got lemons, might as well make lemonade.

But does art still matter? Yes, at least art that reaches the mainstream. So called high art is another matter – current “serious” art has been consigned to the ivory tower of the modern university. Its relevance to contemporary life is unclear.

Popular art still has the capacity to shape the popular will. In the era before WW1, young men’s hearts were stirred in favor of patriotism by poems and prose that glorified war’s majestic violence; as a result, when WW1 broke out, large numbers of earnest young men eagerly joined the slaughter. In the aftermath of the carnage, the popular images of war turned from heroic fantasies to realistic notions of horrific and pointless violence. Post WW1 art reflected the darker mood, thus Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (also an early popular sound movie). Post war German painters developed a particularly biting form of portraiture. The French in turn produced nihilistic DADA and then self absorbed Surrealism.

So in Iraq’s wake, we’ll require an art capable of grappling with Iraq’s lessons. But almost as important is the continual need to revamp our imagery in the face of an updated present. In the world before modern technology, images were rare and precious. Now they are not. Thus, when one can Google for a picture of a man being hung (just try Google images) the ancient images of death, like the "Dying Gaul" above, may have lost their power to stir emotions. For the student of Western art, this piece has long been studied for its prescient realism. But it also once moved viewers with its depiction of a noble warrior grappling with death. That lesson is gone.

To appreciate death today, we need images that can move the contemporary mind. This modern trend began with the art of the Civil War, as in the pictures of the dead of Antietam (here and here). Nobility has been replaced by meaninglessness, empty carnage on the scale of modern factory production. (The civil war era also produced images of glory, but these were hand-made images, and often seem stilted when viewed today; the photographs on the other hand have retained their power).

Shakespeare’s works have been updated continually since they were first performed. Updating is central to our being able to understand them. Not all contemporary producers go as quite so far as Richard Loncraine did with his 1995 movie of Richard III (this version took place in the 1930’s with very recognizable characters) – but in nearly all productions, changes are made to accommodate modern ears. Perhaps a future production of Macbeth will replace the witches with figures based upon Hannity and Colmes. And perhaps an updated Lady Macbeth will look like Condoleezza Rice - ever attempting to scrub away her sin.

So… what story will art hope to tell us about Iraq? Tomorrow, we'll attempt to find some answers.

--T. McKenna

Friday Reflection: For the Heart of the Sun

click the graphic to listen to the end of "Pigs"

Perhaps the first point we should make clear about this week's banner quote is that it's not about Bush or any other inhabitant of the presidential residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave (though it might as well be). In fact, Roger Waters was describing—or perhaps assaulting would be a more accurate term—Mary Whitehouse, a morality campaigner favored by the Margaret Thatcher government, that fish-n-chips neocon hegemony of the '80's.

Apparently, Mary was quite the tight little priss—think of her as the James Dobson/Brent Bozell of her day. Anti-gay, anti-violence, anti-sex, anti-liberal, anti-fun—anti-everything, in fact, that didn't come wrapped in moral shades of Hallmark card bland. She was, of course, quite effective in her shrill damnation of everything in the media or the arts that was sensual or at the mildest variance with her narrow view of family values. Unfortunately, her success encouraged a lot of copycat acts, right unto this day, in which we have Rush, Coulter, O'Reilly and the like stirring the most violent hatred against any movies, music, and media that offend them.

So Waters chose as one of the "three different kinds" of pigs, this Mary Whitehouse. Here's the complete verse, which closes the song:

Hey you, Whitehouse,
Ha ha charade you are.
You house proud town mouse,
Ha ha charade you are
You're trying to keep our feelings off the street.
You're nearly a real treat,
All tight lips and cold feet
And do you feel abused?

You gotta stem the evil tide,
And keep it all on the inside.
Mary you're nearly a treat,
Mary you're nearly a treat
But you're really a cry.

What follows this is one of the musical highlights of Animals: David Gilmour reminding us why they called it an "electric" guitar. "Pigs" concludes with a guitar solo of spine-tingling virtuosity. Gilmour's art illustrates a guiding principle of musicianship, which is well known among classical artists: if you'd like to be a great soloist, learn accompaniment first. Listen to Gilmour's lyrical, trickling notes during Dick Parry's saxophone solo in Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and you'll hear his eminent skill at accompaniment. Or check out the second part of Dogs, where he simply strums some brooding chords on the acoustic instrument, while the howling and barking of the dogs begins: it is one of the most simple and chilling moments in modern musical history. Unforgettable stuff from a pure artist of the guitar.

The Floyd were great not because they broke all the rules of successful music-making; but because they had learned them first. Every member of that band came to it as an accomplished artist; growing still, as all true artists always are, but whole and grounded in their technique. Thus, to write them off as an LSD-band or some electro-freak show that got by on gear and sound effects alone is to betray a very superficial understanding of their music, and of music in general. These guys were pros.

At one point during the interview segment of the Pompeii film, Waters grimly invites anyone who thinks they can do better to come on along and try: here's the gear, have a go. If you think just having the techno-goodies makes you an artist, then don't let the lack of them stop you. Perhaps it's a sarcastic point, but one that probably needed to be made.

The musicians of Pink Floyd weren't a pack of drugged-out little boys hacking at electronic toys; they were professionals who quietly worked at their art, perfected it, and in the process rewrote the history of music, leaving behind a body of work that will be heard and loved by generations still to be born.

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Pink Floyd: recordings

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
A Saucerful of Secrets
More
Ummagumma
Atom Heart Mother
Relics
Meddle
Obscured by Clouds
The Dark Side of the Moon
Animals
The Wall
Wish You Were Here
A Collection of Great Dance Songs
The Final Cut
Echoes


Pink Floyd on DVD

Live at Pompeii
Pulse
The Wall

Pink Floyd: concerts

Fillmore West, April, 1970

pigs_ending.m4a

Ticking Away: The Doomsday Clock

You got to be crazy, gotta have a real need
Gotta sleep on your toes, and when you're on the street
You got to be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight
You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking.

And after a while, you can work on points for style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake
A certain look in the eye, and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You'll get the chance to put the knife in.

Dogs: if this music doesn't raise the hairs on your neck, best see if your head's still attached. It's one of the more moving, shattering songs that PF created over the course of their decade of creative maturity. Waters' metaphor is savagely poignant: the corporate hound, in a career of backstabbing, life-sucking, money-hungry depredation, finds that his blood has congealed--calcified with the weight of his accumulated crimes--and it drags him down to inner death, drowns him in the pool of his own poison.

Guitarist David Gilmour, one of the purest musicians of our era, is also at his heart-stopping, inspiring best on this track, in which he combines acoustic and electric sequences in music that raises Waters' verse to a level of sublimity that is rarely touched in modern music.

There are amazing discoveries to be made throughout this album: Gilmour performs further wonders in his solos on Pigs and Sheep, and even the tiny snippets that open and close the album (Pigs on the Wing) are moving in their irony--parodies of the top-40 love songs that were (and are) the radio rage while PF continued their practice of creating long, carefully constructed pieces of music that could be explored rather than merely enjoyed.

Animals, on the whole, is perhaps the last great collaboration of these outstanding artists (and I include Wright and Mason there, whose contributions throughout the PF era have been generally underestimated). True, there is some great music on The Wall, but by that time Waters and his runaway ego had taken over the band, and it was no more the seamless unit that changed the history of music with Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals.

Personally, I wish they'd included Dick Parry on the recording sessions (he did accompany the band on the Animals tour). Parry is the saxophonist whose sound had become so central to the PF aura in Dark Side and Wish You Were Here. Yet even without him, Animals is one of the high points in the entire history of modern recorded music.

Click the graphic above and listen to the first few minutes of Dogs, and then remember, there's more after that. When most musicians are wrapping up a song, the Floyd are just getting warm.

Yet in the context of the themes of our blog here, the reason we honor Pink Floyd is for their message as well as their artistry. Isn't it cool to hear a band sing of things other than a wounded heart and a hardened cock? Isn't it refreshing to hear musicians with a sense for politics and social awareness? Well, back when the Dixie Chicks were twinkles in their Daddies' eyes, the Floyd were out there, singing a relentless lyric of truth to power.

As the planet heats up, we move a few steps closer to nuclear winter. In a week where the UN informed us that over 34,000 innocents were murdered in Iraq last year; when a vile new term entered public discourse ("troop surge"); when further evidence was piled onto what we already know about the rush to planetary genocide known as global warming; then perhaps it is time we had more artists like Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright to inspire us, entertain us, and rigorously remind us of who we are and where we are headed. The scientists have done their best in their own way, and today they were joined by Stephen Hawking:

"Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapons have been used in war, though the world has come uncomfortably close to disaster on more than one occasion," Prof Hawking said. "But for good luck, we would all be dead.

"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility once again to inform the public and advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces.

"We foresee great perils if governments and society do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and prevent further climate change."

Happy Global Orgasm Solstice, From Daily rEvolution

Hey everybody, want a holiday on which there can be no "war"? Something that everyone—even Bill O'Reilly—can celebrate in their own way, alone or with significant other(s)? Here it is, today: welcome to Global Orgasm Day. Yep, and now you know what G-O-D really means!

Kind of makes you want to ignore the rest of the news. But duty also calls: Remember the Pfizer ad we posted a little while back, here? Well, check out what the geniuses at Pfizer had to choke up for their ex-CEO:

McKinnell's package, which the company disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday, totals more than $180 million. It includes an estimated $82.3 million in pension benefits, $77.9 million in deferred compensation, and cash and stock totaling more than $20.7 million.

So make a note of whichever of the big P's products you're buying these days (and that's just the OTC stuff), and see if you can choose something else. I can't imagine trusting the health of my innards to a bunch of morons who would fork over $180M to some smarmy corporate con artist. Meanwhile, somebody get me a soma.

Now, to the really big news of the day. If you want to see the title of Book 7 of the Harry Potter series, click and drag over the white space between the lines below. But if you'd like to find out for yourself, go to Ms. Rowling's site, click the eraser, and start the journey. Hint: you'll know you're almost there when you start feeling like Saddam. I'll give you until after the holiday to check it out, and next week we'll start to consider what it all might mean.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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Friday Reflection

Whenever I begin to suspect that all the truly great writers are all dead, I pick up one of this lady's works. Our banner quote for the week (reproduced below) is from Holy the Firm, a tiny masterpiece (it's all of 76 pages long) from 1977.

The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for the people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can—and will—do?

If you have a cell of poetry in your being (you've got plenty more than that, whether you're aware of it or not), this book is worth reading, and then reading again. Many of you probably know Dillard from a truly diamond-like book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In books like Pilgrim and Holy, you can hear the singing of a unique voice of our time, a voice of whom none less than Eudora Welty wrote, "A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled..."

Let's have another selection from Holy The Firm, in which she comically compresses this Aristotelian notion of a primum materia:

These are only ideas, by the single handful. Lines, lines, and their infinite points! Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung. And cry down the line to his passing white ear, "Old Sir! Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hole? O Old! Where is your other hand?" His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm.

I think it was Joseph Campbell who once said that writers, poets, and artists are the leaders of every age's most transformative cycles, the beacons to every bloodless revolution. I can sense such a voice in Annie Dillard, who teaches us that the artist is simply the medium for something else, whose name is elusive, personal, and infinite:

How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.